Motocross My Heart: MXGP

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I spent a frankly ludicrous amount of time playing Motocross Madness 2. Along with 1nsane (was there ever a sequel called In2ane?), it was one of two semi-open world driving games that I found much more enjoyable than track-based offerings. The joy of driving up the biggest hill in sight, spinning through the air with all the grace of an airborne emu and crumpling into the mud, a broken ragdoll of a man. Sometimes I’d just aim for the horizon and ride, or chase other motorbikes, pretending that I was a predator and they were my prey. That’s about as much as I know about Motocross so I’m somewhat disappointed that the new physics trailer for officially licensed game MXGP doesn’t contain any crashes or hunting at all.

Due in March, the game uses the official license and recreates tracks 1:1 scale. The video shows the Maggiora track, which I presume is named after an opera. The full game will include 60 bikes, 60 riders and 12 tracks, and the website says ‘REALISM’ quite a lot. A full career mode is promised, with contract signings and the like, and that’s the sort of mode that usually convinces me to invest time in a sports game, if done well.

Making a guess from experience, what happened was they captured in Sony’s implementation of AVCHD, converted it to a compressed pro res format for easier editing then realised that they couldn’t use that to upload to youtube, so converted it again into another AVCHD or MP4. It certainly demonstrates that some people don’t bother to check the video after upload though.

Looks like quite pleasant bike- and mud-physics judging from the video. I too wish there were more open world dirtbike games (like MM2) though. MX vs ATV Reflex does have some (not that large) areas, as well as pretty good physics, and of course there are some quite large usermade maps for GTA 4 that you can race around in with the Sanchez, but that’s about it for open world dirtbiking on the PC, afaik. :|

Apparently In2ane isn’t much like 1nsane though and is more of a straight forward arcade game. I don’t think the reviews slathered it in praise either but then Mediocre doesn’t necessarily mean “not worth playing”.

I don’t know, that looks quite a lot like Milestone’s WRC3 as in a bit dull.
Oh how I miss you “Edgar Torronteras’ Extreme biker”.. I even have the original cd but the thing wont run on modern machines anymore.

After having played MX vs ATV Reflex last week every other motocross game now looks incredibly boring to me in terms of controls. That game ruined me, I don’t think I’ll every want to play another bike game where you cannot control the bike and the rider seperately.

I would suggest MX Simulator You need a controller and the learning curve is pretty steep but as someone who rides motocross competitively in real life I find this to be the most realistic. Just remember to turn off arcade mode